The Secret Service detained a man at a Maryland town hall yesterday carrying a sign reading, "'Death To Obama, Death To Michelle And Her Two Stupid Kids." Why don't Republicans at least say, "Don't threaten to kill the president"?

MSNBC just aired video of a man with a pistol strapped to his leg waiting for Barack Obama to…
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Kostric, we learned after seeing him interviewed on Hardball yesterday, was just a provocateur who sought to thumb his nose at authority and get on TV. But why did he want to get on TV? To spread his message and propagate his ideas. And what are his ideas? That it's time to shed the blood of our leaders.

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These death threats aren't threats—they're challenges. They're attempts to inject into the public debate the sense that violence is a legitimate response to political defeat. As someone in the blogosphere whom we can't presently recall wrote yesterday, the appropriate response to a president who advocates rounding up the elderly and sending them before death panels is—if it seems like he's on the cusp of achieving that goal—to kill or rebel against him. And each publicized call for Obama's death adds to the public perception that we've reached a decision-point about whether it's time for killing. Every sign—even if the bearer is merely an angry loon who could never get close to Obama—is an inducement to someone who is willing to try. It's a message to fellow travelers, a signal that they are not alone in their rage, a promise of glory to come if they actually manage to get the job done. As we said before, there are always people who want to kill the president. The question is how many give it a shot. And the more of these signs there are in the background of Fox News' live report from some town hall in Missouri saying that someone should give it a shot, the more people actually will. And the more people that give it a shot, the more likely someone is to hit the jackpot.

This is not an idle concern: Obama gets 30 death threats every day, according to Ron Kessler, who recently wrote a book about the Secret Service. That's a four-fold increase over the number that George W. Bush—the most reviled president in modern history—received. Secret Service resources are stretched thin, and every threat has to be investigated not matter how harmless.

If GOP politicians were to be outspoken in telling their supporters that strenuous political opposition is OK but that glorifying violence is not—how many signs have you seen reading "Sic Semper Tyrannis"?—it might go a long way toward tamping down the rage and decreasing the likelihood that someone actually becomes convinced that Sean Hannity will have him on the show as a reward for stopping Obama's march toward a "culture of death." But rage is all they've got, so rage it is. Not one GOP politician that we can find has distanced themselves from that rage. They've embraced it.